"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."
Confucius, anticipating Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in Henry David Thoreau Walden (Project Gutenberg edition)
"a young woman I met recently... went back to school and was taking a basic literacy course. After weeks of discouragement, she found herself one day – for the first time – able to help her seven year-old daughter with her homework. She said it made her believe that you should never be frightened to reach for the moon. Even if you miss, she said, you will be amongst the stars."
Lloyd Axworthy in a speech to the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen March 1995
"To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Andrew Coyne in Maclean’s Jan. 21, 2008
In my latest National Post column I express amazement at the ruckus over the Roman Catholic Church insisting that... communion wafers must contain wheat.
"True success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful."
Paul Sweeney, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail December 20, 2004
“Religion may very well be an illusion, as Freud said, but then man himself is that illusion.”
William Barrett The Illusion of Technique
"St. Augustine, asked what he would do if he knew the world would end tomorrow, replied, 'I would go on working in my garden.'"
Florence King in National Review May 1, 1995 p. 92.
"It is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people’s sins."
G.K. Chesterton, “The Midnight of Europe,” in The Crimes of England, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #2 (October-November 2003)